Officials spar over derailed payroll plan

Tempers boiled over at a recent meeting of the Maury County Administrative Committee, where a debate — or lack thereof — over county payroll was put off to an unspecified date.

Tempers boiled over at a recent meeting of the Maury County Administrative Committee, where a debate — or lack thereof — over county payroll was put off to an unspecified date.

On Thursday, admin committee Chairman June Beckum told two commissioners they were out of order after they attempted to broach discussion over a county payroll policy that was originally passed by the full commission last June.

Beckum began the meeting saying she was not going to allow discussion of the policy, in a statement she said was made at the request of a single, unnamed member of the admin committee.

“There seemed to be some confusion … about an item being docketed on today’s agenda,” she said. “That item was not docketed because that is not an administrative issue, and it will be going through the proper committee sometime this month.”

The item — which Beckum later confirmed to be Resolution 7-12-24 — is an effort to line the pay periods of hourly employees up with the twice-per-month pay period currently used for salaried county employees. One option the commission could consider is to hold a week of pay in arrers to roll the pay period back. The other is to provide a special pay period to account for the time the employees worked.

The two commissioners — Scott Cepicky and Debbie Turner — however, continued to push for the plan to come up for discussion.

Cepicky said it would be fairly simple to create a special pay period and that it would give the hourly employees the pay they had earned, and he countered Beckum’s claim that the plan was not administrative issue.

Minutes of several meetings provide evidence to the contrary, he said.

He said the resolution was originally approved June 18 in response to a budget flub from the previous fiscal year. While hourly employees are paid bi-weekly — typically 26 paychecks a year — the county did not account for an additional, unbudgeted pay period during the fiscal year.

As a result, a resolution was written to “streamline the payroll process and make the handling of payroll more time efficient and cost effective.” To avoid a similar oversight, the resolution outlines the withholding of one pay period from hourly employees in order to make the switch.

The minutes read that after the commission approved the policy, it was deferred to the Aug. 9 meeting of the administrative committee. The committee was to work out how the plan could be executed without causing financial harm to hourly employees. In August and September, the committee deferred a decision on the plan.

The policy has not reappeared on the committee’s agenda since.

Last Wednesday, Turner wrote an email to Beckum to request the resolution be placed back on the administrative committee’s Dec. 6 agenda. The email obtained by The Daily Herald was received by each member of the commission, and triggered a chain of email correspondences.

In a message to County Attorney Daniel Murphy, Turner wrote that members of the administrative committee had indicated the policy would be discussed at the committee’s February meeting, rather than by a different committee later this month as Beckum reported.

“That was referred back to their committee, and they are refusing to take action on it,” Turner said after the meeting Thursday. “They’re stonewalling it. They don’t want to bring it out. They want it to be dead and hid over there in that committee. We owe the county employees, one way or the other, a decision before February.”

In a separate email thread, Commissioner Lucy Ledbetter asked the commissioners to consider what their true reasons were for in their attempts to get the policy on the agenda.

“Do we represent the taxpayers’ interests, or are we simply trying to buy influence with the county employees in case we run for mayor?” she wrote.

Several of these county employees were present at Thursday’s meeting, and said they were concerned about the effects the policy would have on their ability to pay bills, support their families or make ends meet.

One such county worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said she felt she was not being allowed to speak on a topic that involves her livelihood.

“I think that it is unfair to elect people in positions that won’t let the public be heard,” she said. “Before we’re employees, we are taxpayers. I don’t think they understand. The two commissioners who were trying to speak were disrespected, and we were disrespected.”